Human Cargo Read online

  Over the next three years, shocked by what he felt to be betrayal, Musa slowly shed his hopes. He accepted that he had nowhere to sleep, but had to move from week to week to the floors of other refugees’ rooms, always hiding, knowing that if he was picked up by the police without papers he might be deported or imprisoned. He had understood that he would still have to wait, perhaps for years, for UNHCR to decide whether what he witnessed and endured amounted to the “justified fear of persecution” that would alone grant him refugee status and the possibility of resettlement in the West. He had accepted that he would find no work other than occasional day labor in the black economy, for as an asylum seeker with no papers he could not officially work. He concentrated only on one thing: finding his wife and children and bringing them to live with him on the streets of Cairo. (It was not until much later, when I went to the border between Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea, that I really understood why the young Liberians had known that they had to flee.) Among the small community of Liberian lost boys, he was seen as a loner; he preferred to put his energy into his dreams, alongside which Cairo, with its overcrowding and its incessant noise, its poverty and racism, its bullying police and indifferent aid workers, was a passing nightmare. The boyhood image he had of himself as a teacher and future village elder remained as real to him as it had ever been; he could not and would not give it up, just as he would not learn Egyptian Arabic, for to do so meant that he had accepted that he would never leave. And so he preferred not to seek out the company of the other Liberians, with similar pasts, young men like Abdula, who made jokes in an American accent learned from the tourists who used to come to Egypt before the specter of terrorism destroyed the holiday market, and who saw rebel soldiers burn his father over an open fire before hacking him into little pieces, or Mohamed, a tall boy with a moonlike face and frightened eyes, who watched as his godmother’s head was kicked about like a football, or Abu, the boy soldier, whose rite of passage included the slitting open of a pregnant woman’s stomach. What these lost boys had seen and been forced to do is not something others cared to hear about.

  • • •

  IN AUTUMN, THE early mornings in Cairo are almost cool. The pollution, which normally hangs over the streets like a heavy yellow blanket, is light and at this hour the city is still and quiet. Long before it is properly day, the asylum seekers gather at the gates of the offices of UNHCR. There are the Dinkas from Sudan with their very long legs, and the elegant high-cheekboned Somalis; some of the Sierra Leoneans have no arms or hands, the rebels there having decided that mutilating civilians was an effective way of terrorizing those who might be tempted to support the government. Then there are the Ethiopians, whose ancient allegiance to Haile Selassie has branded them as traitors to their country’s new regime; men and women from Rwanda and Burundi, where massacres became a way of life; other Sudanese, dissident survivors of torture in Khartoum’s security headquarters. They come at dawn to wait, in the hope that their names may feature on the new lists of those called for interview, to hand in documents, to jostle for a slip of paper with a date on which they can collect a form that will allow them to apply for an interview, many months, even years, into the future. Documents of any kind, even scraps of paper with a number on them, are infinitely precious: they suggest identity, a possible existence. Tattered high school certificates, old driver’s licenses, envelopes with addresses on them, preserved against all odds during flight, are guarded and produced with pride. At UNHCR’s gates all fear that they may learn that their appeal has failed and their file is closed, so that the future contains only statelessness or deportation. “Closed File,” the terrible phrase that signifies the end of this particular road, is written in large black capital letters.

  • • •

  SINCE THE MIDDLE of the 1980s, Egypt—along with forty other countries—has opted for the solution of having UNHCR interview its asylum seekers in order to decide how well founded is their fear of persecution. The result is that the UN body, once revered for its mandate of protecting refugees, is, in Egypt, both prosecution and defense, an anomalous and uneasy position it occupies today with growing prickliness and suspicion. In 2000, 3,057 refugees left Cairo for new lives in the United States, Canada, and Australia (nearly all go to the United States). But after September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush declined to fix a quota for that year’s intake, thereby closing the door not only to the refugees who hoped to win places, but also to all those who had already been accepted but had not yet left and have now been told they need to be vetted again for possible terrorist links. No one really thinks that the United States will ever again be very welcoming to those persecuted in other lands.

  Inside UNHCR’s offices, where only those called for interview ever penetrate, there is an embattled air. It is not easy to be a gatekeeper to the future of so many desperate people; nor is it easy to keep in mind the intricacies of civil war and political repression across much of the African continent. Not all the young Egyptians employed to vet cases enjoy pronouncing on whether the violence suffered and remembered constitutes a degree of persecution extreme enough to make return too dangerous. In this daily listening for the nuances of deceit, the little lies that will mark a claim as false, something of UNHCR’s noble mandate is being lost, but it is perhaps wrong to blame those who listen, hour after hour, to these tales of bloodshed and torture. There are too many cases, too much suffering, too little time. What is happening in Cairo today is happening all over the world; as the funds are cut and the number of asylum seekers keeps on growing, as the West becomes more fearful and more isolated, those who man the gates in Cairo are under pressure to search ever more keenly for lies and inconsistencies, while refugees despair.

  • • •

  FEAR, MEMORY, AND expectations endlessly deferred rule in the quicksands of Cairo’s refugee world. Psychiatrists say that it is important for peace of mind to live in the present, to come to terms with daily existence, and to neither brood about the past nor attach too much meaning to the future; but the refugees trapped in Cairo today, haunted by terrifying memories of loss and savagery, seduced by a longing for a world they perceive as stable and fulfilling, cannot accept the present. Cairo is a prison sentence, to be endured because there is no option. They simply wait. “The problem for refugees here,” a young man told a church worker not long ago, “is that they have no real existence: they live in their head.” Like Musa, no African will consider learning more than the few words of Arabic he needs to live: it is too potent a symbol of failure. The few lucky enough to have the desperately desired blue refugee card are not always the happiest. Gone are the terrors of sudden arrest, but resettlement is never automatic and it can take many years; the waiting becomes almost too painful. The image of the West becomes more glorious month by month. There have been suicides, people unable to wait any longer; they have no courage left, having used it up on their torturers and the long, frightening journeys to safety. When the refugees decide to die, some do so by jumping from the balconies of Cairo’s tall buildings; a ten-year-old-boy killed himself this way shortly before my last visit.

  Cairo is not just one of the most polluted cities in the world. It is dirty, intensely overcrowded, broken down, and full of rubble, with roads built up on legs above other roads in an attempt to ease the traffic jams that paralyze the city for all of the day and most of the night. Occasionally, between the brick and the cement, you catch glimpses of filigreed minarets, delicately carved porticoes and arcades, stately facades and the traces of sumptuous courtyards, earlier Cairos of the Islamic master craftsmen and Coptic merchants, when the city was a splendid place of pleasure gardens and cool palaces, and civil servants in their red fezzes strolled along tree-lined avenues where visitors drank sherbet in famous tea rooms. It is the utterly derelict nature of the city today that partly makes possible its absorption of so many refugees—200,000? 500,000? No one can say for sure. Around the city’s edges, entrepreneurs keep constructing identical cinder-block bui
ldings in ever widening circles, always leaving the top floor unfinished, so that more floors can be added year by year. From the top of the buildings along the Nile, on the rare moments when the smog evaporates and the setting sun lights up the horizon, you can see the Pyramids in Giza, framed by the jagged edges of unfinished blocks. Wherever the buildings are most derelict, the electricity supplies most sporadic, the water least reliable, there the refugees live.

  Donzo is another young Liberian, an almost jaunty good-looking Mandingo with deep regular gashes along both his cheeks. He was one of the first of the young men to bring me his testimony, for me to turn into a formal application for refugee status with UNHCR. When he was sixteen, Donzo was caught by Charles Taylor’s men. They didn’t want him for a boy soldier, but they wanted information about the Mandingos. He had none to give. Before letting him go, a soldier took out his knife and, getting his companions to hold the boy still, carved slits across both sides of his face. Six years later, having lost his grandparents, both parents, seven brothers and sisters, several aunts and uncles, and many cousins, he fled to Cairo and went to live with eleven other young Africans on the seventh floor of what must once have been a fine apartment block. This was soon after the meeting in the offices of the African Studies department at the American University in February 2000, when the young Liberians took to living in groups, and I started visiting them at home, so that they could show me, with a mixture of pride and embarrassment, how they were coping with their lives.

  In two high-ceilinged rooms with cornices and the remains of parquet floors, these eleven young men have two broken beds, two chairs, three blankets, a lightbulb, and a very old, erratic television set. The glass in the windows up the staircase has long since broken, leaving a few splintered edges. An elevator, its mahogany doors wrenched off, dangles from one rusting pulley. Rubbish fills every corner; down the wide marble stairs, chipped and blackened by filth, trickles an open sewer. The bannisters have gone. It is almost completely dark. Donzo and his companions live on $40 a month, the allowance received from UNHCR by the one Sierra Leonean recognized as an official refugee. At the beginning of the month, when the money comes, Donzo tells me, they eat rice and some vegetables cooked in oil; by the end they are down to just bread. They seldom leave the building, for fear of arrest, preferring to spend the months of waiting in the semi-dark, almost comatose with boredom and inertia. Izako, Donzo’s friend and a former customs officer, had left a wife and two children in Monrovia, after he had been tortured and raped by Charles Taylor’s soldiers: he worries, during the long empty days, over whether they are still alive. If UNHCR acceptance rates remain the same, I write in my notebook after this first visit to their rooms, seven of these eleven boys will never leave Cairo.

  Asylum seekers with families, like the thousands of Sudanese who have arrived since the war intensified in southern Sudan in the late 1990s, prefer to live in shantytowns on the outskirts, where women, whose husbands have been killed, share rooms without light or water. Tuberculosis among these families is endemic; the children have open sores and scabies; they cough and scratch constantly. They do not go to school, for school is not available to asylum seekers, and a whole generation is growing up illiterate. When the Sudanese women find work as maids, they lock their children for safety into the almost empty, dusty, boxlike rooms, where they lie on blankets on the dirt floor. Apart from the shafts of light that filter through cracks in the door, it is dark; they stay there all day. At Arba Nos, where the desert begins, three hundred Sudanese families live and wait.

  • • •

  IN THE NEXT three years, between the spring of 2000 and late 2003, I went back to Cairo four times, with Lyndall Passerini, a writer friend. We returned to help set up a legal advice center for asylum seekers to prepare their submissions and their testimonies for their interviews with UNHCR, and, with money from friends, to start a number of small educational projects among people for whom schooling is often the only symbol of a possible better future. We found the money to provide teachers for classes of young Somalis, held in the homes of those fortunate enough to have homes; to fund a nursery school at Arba Nos for Sudanese children up to the age of four, giving them food and medical care and somewhere to spend the days, so that their mothers when going out to work did not have to leave them; and to support English classes for adult Sudanese who, hoping for eventual resettlement in Australia, Canada, or the United States, knew that speaking English was a first step to getting there. But it was the Liberians who, day after day, brought us their stories and proved the most engaging and demanding students.

  By the spring of 2001, exactly a year after my first visit to Cairo, a flat had been rented in one of Cairo’s poorest and most distant suburbs, two classes formed with blackboards and plastic chairs, maps of Africa pinned to the walls, and books brought out from England. A teacher had been found, and Mohamed Bafahe, a tall, responsible young man who had been a teacher in Monrovia before having to flee Charles Taylor’s men, was appointed director of the school. Bafalie’s wife, Khalidatou, who had followed him to Cairo after being persecuted by soldiers, had been forced to leave their small son and daughter behind with her mother. From the first day the young Liberians were absolutely clear about their school: they wanted to learn everything. Asked to make lists of what they wished to be taught, they wrote down: engineering, psychiatry, car maintenance, political science, economics, media studies, philosophy, law, history, medicine, creative writing. Most could read and write, but very few had completed more than a couple of years of elementary school. They accepted with good grace when offered English gram mar, literature, and a little modern history and politics. Given their fares by bus to this distant flat, they came assiduously, though their journeys—they were the only black people in crowds of often hostile Cairenes—were frightening. Mohamed, the moonfaced boy, was attacked one day on a bus by a group of teenage boys, who beat him about the head with a stick with a nail in it. Early gatherings were polite, subdued; as the months passed, as they felt safer, the young men began to challenge and argue. They began to want things. They were always polite, but they were now also firm. In class, they asked questions, they demanded tests; they wanted, always, more: more homework, more classes, more information. They wanted the Internet and new computers, they wanted certificates, they wanted assurances that they would not be abandoned.

  And, slowly, they advanced up the uncertain and interminable queue at UNHCR. By the time of my third visit, in the spring of 2002, all fifty-six had had their first interview, and five had been accepted for resettlement in the West. Their pleasure, their excitement at such good fortune, spread through the group: it had happened to five, it could happen to them all. Though they were still living on the edge of destitution and subject to casual racist attacks, the mood within the group became lighter. They gave out a sense that the future had opened again. Now, e-mailing me when I was back in London, they tentatively asked for things, impossibly ambitious often, but a sign that they imagined a life in which they might really become engineers and lawyers. Kabineh, a short, very young-looking boy with cropped hair and a childish grin, wrote: “I am sleeping from place to place with a lot of disturbance. 2 books I really wished you could send for me: (1) mass communication, (2) Business Management.” Bility, who always wore a brown woolly hat, whatever the heat, wondered whether he could have a shortwave radio, to listen to the news from Liberia. All longed for computers.

  In the autumn of 2002, something happened that changed the Liberian story. One of the young men, Amr, was arrested. For a while, no one could discover why. It became known that he had been taken to the Mogamma, a vast, ugly government building that faces Cairo’s fine Museum of Antiquities in Tahir Square, with cells for those Egypt is planning to deport. There were rumors that he had been tortured. At a first court appearance, he was seen to have bruises on his face and neck, and he appeared confused and fragile. Then it transpired that the security police had spotted him outside the Israeli embassy, decid
ed that he had been spying for Israel, and further suspected that he was involved in a money-laundering operation. The charges were absurd; but in the precarious world in which Cairo’s asylum seekers exist, they were terrifying. If the Egyptian police could really imagine that a Muslim Liberian was helping the Israeli secret police, then which one of them might not be a target next?

  Other arrests followed. One of the first was Kono, a short, thickset, phlegmatic young man of twenty, one of the group’s only two Christians. He was solid, slow moving, and very sad. I knew Kono from my first visit to Cairo, when he came to my flat one day and described his childhood. He was the only son of parents who had both worked for Samuel Doe, president of Liberia until ousted by the rebels; when the rebels closed in on the presidential palace, they arrested everyone they found with any connection to the dead president, and killed both his parents. Kono had then gone to live with a much-loved uncle and aunt, who brought him up as their son, until the day that his aunt went to the market and was captured by rebels and raped before being killed. His uncle survived for a while longer, but then he, too, died in one of the frequent outbreaks of violence that consumed Monrovia in the 1990s. Kono was then twelve.

  In Cairo, awaiting news of his UNHCR interview, Kono had decided, for reasons he was never able to explain to anyone, to accept an offer made to young Muslims from Africa to study at Al Azhar, Cairo’s Islamic university, and to take a place in the dormitory they provided for homeless students. He did not, of course, tell them that he was a Christian. However, someone informed on him. He was immediately arrested by the university’s guards and turned over to the police, who announced that he would be deported. Unusually, he was left in a corridor while arrangements were being made to take him to a prison; he escaped, and made his way to the offices of UNHCR, where an outraged young Egyptian interviewer told him that she wanted nothing more to do with him, as, having lied to Al Azhar, he was clearly a liar, and as such ineligible for any kind of UNHCR assistance. Kono disappeared into hiding.